Chien-Shiung Wu (1912 - 1997)

Chinese physicist Chien-Shiung Wu worked with Tsung Dao Lee and Ning Yang at Columbia University. She experimentally disproved the "parity principle" in nuclear physics, and when Lee and Yang won the Nobel Prize in 1957 for this work, they credited her work as being key to the discovery.

Chien-Shiung Wu also worked on the atomic bomb for the United States during World War II at Columbia's Division of War Research and taught university-level physics.

After she left for graduate work in the US, she never saw her parents again (because of World War II and bad US-China post-war relations). When she finally was able to visit China again in 1973, her uncle and brother had perished in the Cultural Revolution and the tombs of her parents had been destroyed. She was greeted by Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who personally apologized for the destruction of the tombs. After this, she returned to China several times.

Known for
work on Manhattan Project

Wu experiment, which contradicted the hypothetical law of conservation of parity

Parity violation

Beta decay

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